Cross-platform, cross-browser way to play sound fr

Question

I am writing a dhtml application that creates an interactive simulation of a system. The data for the simulation is generated from another tool, and there is already a very large amount of legacy data.

Some steps in the simulation require that we play "voice-over" clips of audio. I've been unable to find an easy way to accomplish this across multiple browsers.

Soundmanager2 comes pretty close to what I need, but it will only play mp3 files, and the legacy data may contain some .wav files as well.

Does anyone have any other libraries that might help?

Answer 1

You can use the HTML5 <audio> tag.

Answer 2

dacracots code is clean basic dom, but perhaps written without a second thought? Of course you check the existance of an earlier embed first, and save the duplicate embed creation lines.

var soundEmbed = null;
//=====================================================================

function soundPlay(which)
{
    if (soundEmbed)
       document.body.removeChild(soundEmbed);
    soundEmbed = document.createElement("embed");
    soundEmbed.setAttribute("src", "/snd/"+which+".wav");
    soundEmbed.setAttribute("hidden", true);
    soundEmbed.setAttribute("autostart", true);
    document.body.appendChild(soundEmbed);
}

Came across the thoughts here while scanning for a solution for somewhat similar situation. Unfortunately my browser Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.15) Gecko/2009102814 Ubuntu/8.04 (hardy) Firefox/3.0.15 dies when trying this.

After installing latest updates, firefox still crashes, opera keeps alive.

Answer 3

There is a far more simpler solution to this rather than having to resort to plug-ins. IE has it's own bgsound property and there is another way you can make it work for all other browsers. Check out my tutorial here = http://www.andy-howard.com/how-to-play-sounds-cross-browser-including-ie/index.html